Reviews
Veronica Lee
John Kearns: Shtick, Voodoo Rooms ****London comic John Kearns made history at the weekend, when he became the first comic to win the main prize at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards after winning best newcomer gong, which he did last year That's some achievement.Shtick is in much the same vein as last year's show – lo-fi observational comedy about the mundanities of life given an absurdist twist. But this hour feels a lot more structured and rooted in reality, even if Kearns is again dressed in monk's tonsure wig and ill-fitting false teeth. I suspect, though, that last element of his act may soon Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Fifty-seven minutes into this hour-long programme entitled "Al Murray’s Great British War Films", our host put panellist Dan Snow on the spot and asked him to name his favourite war film. “Does it have to be British?” Snow wondered. For a second it looked like Murray and his other two guests might stick him in solitary confinement for a week, yet Snow’s dizzy reaction was not only (unintentionally) funny but also gave away just how much he’d switched off by now. And he wouldn’t have been alone.For all that it promised – a comedian with a love of history and three panellists sit in lovely Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Even as orchestras began to sound more and more alike, there was the Czech Philharmonic. And many of its notable characteristics remain to this day: a modest, homespun quality, warm and engaging and full of bright-eyed distinction in the woodwinds. In the pithy but immensely passionate overture to Janáček’s last opera From the House of the Dead, under their current music director Jiří Bělohlávek, the rhythmic displacements and precipitously exposed string, brass and timpani writing combined X-ray clarity with a naturalness of expression; later Dvořák in Slavonic mode kicked up his heels Read more ...
Naima Khan
Here's a fun fact: this year the Merriam-Webster dictionary added a new definition for the noun "catfish". As well as the amphibian, a catfish now also refers to "a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes." Having been popularised by the 2010 American film documentary of the same name, the term is also used casually as a verb, meaning to fool someone online. And so we now have emerging American playwright Kathy Rucker's Crystal Springs (***), which puts the catfishing of a 16-year-old centre-stage without fully coming to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the current political climate, it would have been grotesquely inappropriate to conclude even the most fictionalised account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with any kind of neat resolution. But even if Hugo Blick’s absorbing thriller had ever dealt in such things, the carefully orchestrated dual-location bloodbath at the climax of its penultimate episode was all the hint one needed that a happy ending was never on the cards.Moral ambiguity makes for more interesting drama, of course, but by its ending The Honourable Woman had turned traditional notions of “good” and “bad” on their head Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Beethoven went deaf at 26, we're helpfully informed near the start of If I Stay in a bit of information that pales next to the tin ear on display in this late-summer romantic tragedy, which aims to position Chloë Grace Moretz as the next Shailene Woodley. (The actresses are all of five years apart, which constitutes a veritable lifetime in Hollywood). Even more than The Fault in Our Stars, the popular book-turned-film that places tragedy directly in the path of teenage love, this latest young adult novel to become a doomladen tearjerker displays a pretty strange set of priorities. I doubt I'm Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Imagine that you were a TV executive producer, and that you had managed to cast one of the country’s finest actors in the lead role. To what use would you put his considerable talent and gravitas? If your answer was not “engage him in a five-minute shouty monologue about how much he hates his eyebrows”, well, congratulations: you are not Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat. But commiserations too, because you missed out on the funniest and best-played regeneration scenes since the show’s renaissance in 2005.It may have been billed as a feature-length episode, simulcast in cinemas across the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Edinburgh Playhouse is the largest UK theatre regularly used for dance. The stalls alone seat more than the total capacity of Sadler’s Wells, and the two circles combined seat even more again, for a maximum audience of 3,059. To see it filled almost to bursting last night for the first night of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s visit to the Edinburgh International Festival is evidence – if any were needed – that the late Pina Bausch’s company are worldwide superstarsSuch is the power of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s dancers, that when you see from the programme that only ten feature in Sweet Mambo (seven Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Popcorn GirlsAlthough the sole single by troubled American televison and film star Tuesday Weld seems an unlikely dance floor filler, 1962’s cute and gently shuffling “Are You the Boy” became a staple with one of continental Europe's most important and longest-lasting dance music subcultures. Weld sang flat but what mattered for Belgium's Popcorn scene was the rhythm: a mid-tempo, almost-martial two-step which could accompany the “slow swing” dance which gripped the country in the late Sixties and continues to do so.Like Northern Soul – its closest cousin – Popcorn is a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Kate Bush’s return to live performance next week, after 35 years’ absence, has been one of the defining features of this musical year. Her announcement, in March, of the Hammersmith gigs left even David Bowie’s gifted coup in the shade, creating a simmering summer of speculation. It’s surprising, then, that it’s taken the media so long to create the inevitable previews and retrospectives. This BBC Four feature did a bit of both, though it ended with a sense that Bush’s reputation survived the hour despite, rather than because of, the programme’s organisation. Though Bush was dismissed Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This has been a busy season for Off Broadway musicals crossing the pond to London, from Dessa Rose and Dogfight to Forbidden Broadway and See Rock City. But for simplicity of approach coupled with swiftness of emotional attack, Benjamin Scheuer's solo musical The Lion stands apart. That's not just because the Anglo-American Scheuer, 32, possesses an apparent sweetness that makes his sungthrough embrace of anger, rage, and grief - all in the service, it should be added, of forgiveness and acceptance - that much more surprising.More to the point is that the 70-minute trajectory telling of the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For most of us, reaching the age of 50 prompts a mature recognition of faded aspirations, balanced by some degree of respect, influence, and tender familial consolation. Most observers would say Match of the Day fits that pattern quite closely. Its more youthful, dynamic days are remembered with great respect, though it’s politely acknowledged to be wearier and wrinklier than before, its fiftieth birthday is an occasion for dignity and circumspection.So it was a surprise to find this celebration of Match of the Day’s 50 years combining the giddy nausea of a toddlers’ bouncy castle party with Read more ...